Manuel Rivadeneyra
1867. Oil on canvas.Not on display
‘Short-length bust portrait, 62 years old, the prestigious publisher, with grey hair and a bushy white beard, stares at the viewer with a serious expression. He wears a dark frock coat with a badge of a decoration on its lapel.’
Manuel Rivadeneyra was born in Barcelona on the 9th of October 1805. After starting out as a typesetter, he became the most important publisher in Spain during the second half of the 19th century. In addition to publishing an edition of Don Quixote, among others, his name is best known for directing the publication of the Library of Spanish Artists. It was perhaps the most important publishing enterprise undertaken in Spain during the last century. He died in Madrid on the 31st of March 1872, having published 63 volumes of his Library of Spanish Artists. This was later expanded to 71 volumes, which were subsequently reprinted by the Royal Spanish Academy.
Belonging to the artist´s full maturity, this splendid portrait depicts the progressive assimilation in Madrazo´s art of the full Realism that triumphed in the 1860s in Spanish painting, having definitively banished the late-Romantic purism in which this master was trained. Both his son-in-law, Mariano Fortuny, and his own son, Raimundo de Madrazo, made considerable contributions to this movement. Federico de Madrazo himself adopted the liveliest portraits, with an extremely loose and abbreviated technique, modelling the figures with energetic, undone brushstrokes. He captures their features with extraordinary liveliness and freshness, in a fully successful effort to catch up in this portrait with the new trends in European portraiture of his time.
The absolute frankness of its execution and the total absence of any attempt at flattery or accessory in the portrait confirm its character as a gift to the sitter and the friendship that united the latter with Madrazo.
El mundo literario en la pintura del siglo XIX del Museo del Prado, Madrid, Centro Nacional de Exposiciones y Promoción Artística, 1994, p.208 nº40
